I hope this will be a day of new beginnings. I have been hoping for new beginnings for a long time now. When I came to California in the mid nineties, I was surprised. I had always believed that the USA was the largest, strongest democracy in the world. When I came to live inside it, I knew that I had believed a lie, though the promise is still there.
I was born and raised in a democracy and so I can claim that this here isn't the real deal. I was raised with all three primary colors readily available in that political system, and I had therefore no problem seeing here how just red-and-blue colors everyone’s thinking. One primary color is missing in action here and somehow it is not there inside the people either. Red and blue do shine brighter here, but the lack of yellow of very disturbing.
It was an exciting time when I got here, because the Bay Area had started to turn Green a little bit. I expected the Green Party to become bigger and make this a democracy. But then the Machine did its Machine thing.
In San Francisco, the Machine changed at-large elections into good-old-fashioned district elections. Slowly but surely, the Green Party died.
With at-large (a semi-proportional voting system) a supervisor needed only 14.29% of the votes in one cycle and 16.67% of the votes in the other cycle to obtain a seat. The Green Party could get in more easily this way. Diversity was finally coming.
With the change back to the district system, winning the seat would only occur when getting 50% again, a much higher threshold. The Machine did not want to risk the Green Party to obtain power in the bluest city on the West Coast, and so the story goes.
Today, all 11 supervisors are registered democrats, ranked-choice voting showing that it isn’t much of a voting reform at all. Do remember that in 2004 one in six San Franciscans voted for W. Bush and the city has its fair share of Republicans. The truth is that minorities do not get seats in district voting. Only when minorities are majorities do they get seats.
Where I'm from, I found (searching online) a municipality with 11 council seats. There was a local party that was the largest party, and there were three other parties, also known from national politics.
Imagine 11 seats and free elections. Would that turn into 11 representatives of one and the same color, all 11 reps each of a different color, or three or four teams of representatives with each their own color?
If you were born in a democracy, the answer is very obvious of course, three to five parties is the normal outcome. If you were born here, wearing red-and-blue glasses, then you may see a very diverse board in the 11 blue supervisors, but that diversity is also not because the voters picked it that way.
When the at-large elections got changed to district voting, the 5 females and 6 males were replaced by 1 female and 10 males with the very next election. Clever, with the very first opportunities, the Democrats put females in place of vacating males (leaving voluntarily or for some legal reason). The outcome today looks exactly how the Machine knows the voters like it to be. The Machine handpicks its candidates, makes up the races beforehand with a variety of candidates the Machine is all fine with. Voters happy, the Machine happy (but don’t put any yellow in your glasses to see this in full-color).
The United States is a much divided nation because it has an 18th century system that does not deliver. Did you know that the winner in this system has always been the Losing Party?
https://medium.com/the-national-discussion/and-the-winner-is-the-losing-party-c683c1d739e5
It sounds like this contradicts itself, but it is actually true.
We have a system where the voters compete with the voters about who gets to represent the group. The individual is completely unimportant except for the count of one stone toward one side or the other. That is not a democracy. A democracy is a system of representation; it is not a game of representation.
If San Francisco were to have a proportional voting system in place today, then 91.67% of all voters could point their finger at the person on the board they handpicked themselves.
To the left the 11 districts with the eleven winners. The voting minorities in these 11 districts are not represented. The minimum for the win is 50% plus one vote.
To the right, proportional voting with 11 slices in the pie of all votes. It is very difficult to pick a person or group and remain empty-handed. Almost 92% is guaranteed their pick. There are no minorities left behind in proportional voting.
Even a city with just 3 seats would have a minimum of 75% of the voters able to point their fingers to the person they handpicked themselves.
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I wish you all the luck, doing your job well. I have admired you ever since I heard about you in San Francisco. I do not take my being in this nation lightly; there are so many wonderful people here, it is fantastic. But you do know how cold and dark it is here for many people.
The societal outcomes should be much better than they are; there is no reason for it other than a system with stunted growth in store for many.
I'll end this by showing two graphs I created in 2006. They show the political systems in the world divvied up in five groups and how much the top ten percent in a nation gets for themselves. I used respectable sources, like CIA World Factbook, nationmaster.com and others. I worked on this by myself and in my spare time; I didn’t mean to make it super perfect; it was just to see if I could see any patterns appear. Well, the patterns jumped off the data, once organized well.
Our column #1 and column #3 have the potential to really rake it in for the rich. Column #4 and #5 are doing much better for all. The rich are still the rich, but their systems moderate the greed, take from those that have a lot and use it to better society.
The other graph (again, data from 2006) shows how little the bottom ten percent gets.
Again Column #1 and #3 do potentially worst. Columns #4 and #5 do best.The US sits below those columns. If the US were to become a nation with a real democracy (proportional voting influenced), the poor would automatically gain, potentially about 75% more of the national pie than they do now.
If the Machine had made the decision to turn this into a real democracy (for instance by letting the Green Party become a real party and not stunt it in its growth), then the poor would not have been this poor. Our system here is not right, and the weird part is that we all know it and do nothing about it.
The party that believes in the right thing should do the right thing.
The US Constitution is already completely fine with proportional voting at the local level and in the 14th Amendment one can read that the better system is actually preferred. Proportional voting can be put in place today.
I know you are a good force. Good luck in the next four and perhaps eight or more years.
